Tuesday, February 5, 2019

"Medieval man thought that truth had been revealed to him, so that he was spared from its wild pursuit; the reckless energy that we give to seeking it was turned in those days to the creation of beauty; and amid poverty, epidemics, famines, and wars men found time and spirit to make beautiful a thousand varieties of objects, from initials to cathedrals... we thank a million forgotten men for redeeming the blood of history with the sacrament of art."

Sunday, January 20, 2019

"Lord, I can approach you only by means of my consciousness, but consciousness can only approach you as an object, which you are not. I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world—directly, immediately—yet I want nothing more. Indeed, so great is my hunger for you—or is this evidence of your hunger for me?—that I seem to see you in the black flower mourners make beside a grave I do not know, in the embers’ innards like a shining hive, in the bare abundance of a winter tree whose every limb is lit and fraught with snow. Lord, Lord, how bright the abyss inside that “seem.”"

Thursday, December 20, 2018

“You say these Naiads are the
offspring of a god.That makes them some
kind of spirits, right?Just another loony
Greek myth.”“A
very old myth,” Dan said.“Much older
than the Greeks.Springs have always had
their resident divinities.”This
was certainly understandable, I thought.Cold, thirst-quenching, life-giving water sprouting like a miracle from
the dry, rocky earth—what god-fearing goatherd wouldn’t see that as divine?Somewhere an owl softly hooted.With
her arms propped at the water’s edge, Phoebe lowered her face toward the
surface of the spring.She took a short
drink, noisily sucking the water.Then
she raised her dripping face and for a long moment stared unblinking at the pond.I
stopped what I was doing. Dan remained
silent.Had she seen something there,
hidden in the spring, or was she caught by her own reflection?We watched her and waited, and neither of us
spoke.There was something magical about
her, kneeling by this primeval pool in the dark.Her pale arms and face, ghostly in the starlight,
reflected on the undulating mirror of the pond.An aura of stillness surrounded her.Along with the unceasing trickle of the spring, we could hear the sporadic
flutter of wings echo off the rocky walls above us.The place was suffused with an atmosphere of timelessness,
with Phoebe the beating heart of it, as if she were some living token of its
past.

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Poster for 1931 movie of "Frankenstein"with Boris Karloff as the monster

Paul Cantor explains how Mary Shelley's monster tramples over the supposed line between high culture and pop culture:

"I am not trying to lower our opinion of Frankenstein but to raise our opinion of popular culture. Or rather, I want to question the simplistic distinction between high culture and low. Just because a work grows out of or is in some way related to the commercial world does not mean that it is inferior in artistic quality. The great example of this truth is William Shakespeare. He was the most popular playwright in the commercial theater of his day, but of course he was at the same time the greatest dramatic artist.

Engraving by Lynd Wardfor a 1934 edition of "Frankenstein"

"[...] Culture is not neatly divided into different and unrelated media or separated into spheres of high and low, hermetically sealed off from one another. Rather, in a real culture (and not an academic abstract mapping of it), the high and the low inter-penetrate, giving life to each other, and the various media interact in complex patterns.

"Accordingly, one may find great art in the oddest of places, even in the ghoulish story of a misshapen creature turned loose upon the world. High art can grow out of elements of popular culture, and can in turn inspire popular culture to new forms of creativity. Culture is chaotic. It results in artistic order, but not always in an orderly fashion. And that makes culture fundamentally unpredictable."

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Every screenwriter, playwright or novelist will have at some point been advised to read Aristotle's Poetics, his famous treatise on dramatic theory. I read it several decades ago, and aside from the classic three-act structure, the main thing I remember is this simple formula I distilled from it:

Logic + Surprise = Wonder

It's the essence and the payoff of any great story (or any other magic trick, for that matter). As the last and the best of the ancient playwrights put it:

"Many things are wrought by Zeus in Olympus

And heaven works much beyond human imagining

The looked-for result will fail to materialize

While heaven finds ways to achieve the unexpected.

So has it happened in this our story."

Euripides wrote these lines for the conclusion of three of his tragedies, including his final, and most terrifying, The Bacchae.